Undead Diana Cover Brings the Kind of Buzz Tina Brown Doesn't Want

When we asked our readers what they thought of Newsweek's bizarre Princess Diana photoshop job, objections ranged from criticism of the Photoshopping job--"Diana would have looked MUCH better than this at 50," wrote decafd1--to outright disapproval: "This is wildly inappropriate, extremely disturbing, and disrespectful to the family and friends of Princess Diana, especially her sons," wrote Sam Coulter. And let's not forget the sarcastic: "This is the kind of hard-hitting, thought-through journalism that will make Newsweek relevant again," wrote dinosaucer.

But what do Newsweek readers think? After the flood of coverage lead to a million zombie jokes and what-were-they-thinking? blog posts, the magazine asked readers their opinion on Facebook. Despite the abundance of more positive options, respondents overwhelmingly agree on a very negative one:

Yikes! The comments are even worse. Michelle Johnson from Phoenix, Arizona wrote:

I only liked your page so I could express how distasteful and downright vile your cover and story is. Diana still has children and family who loved and adored her. She is not a doll for your writer to dress up and play with on Photoshop. Your publication isn't worthy of being the doormat to the entrance to the National Inquirer's (sic). I hope you get an avalanche of subscription cancellations.

Yikes again! Newsweek looked like it was finally recovering financially, too. Just last week, the magazine announced that the number of ad pages in this July's issue, 52, matched that from last year. This is the first time in a year that Newsweek didn't come up short. Subscriptions were up too. "With a 25 percent rise in newsstand sales, we're thrilled to be where we knew Tina [Brown, editor] and the team would take the magazine at this point in the year," Newsweek publisher Ray Chelstowski toldAdweek.

If you look at Facebook, you can see that disdain is not restricted to the creepy cover image. At the time of this posting, these were the most recent comments on a post about Princess Diana's Facebook page would look like:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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Adam Clark Estes is a former writer for The Wire. He has also written for The Huffington Postand Vice.